Tag: science

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Culture Nature

Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin

Oliver Sacks fans will remember Temple Grandin as the autistic slaughterhouse designer in An Anthropologist on Mars. She has a particular affinity with animals and has used her talent for understanding them to help her design corrals, feedlots and slaughterhouses which are less stressful for the animals.

The subtitle of Animals in Translation is ‘Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior’. Grandin uses her insights as an autistic person to help explain how animals behave and in the process explores the nature of autism itself. That means the book is operating at the intersection of a whole range of different subjects — evolution, selective breeding, autism, animal behaviour, slaughterhouse design, stock handling, animal training — which all shed interesting light on each other. I didn’t come out of it thinking “Ah, now my perception of animals has been transformed!” but I did find it was full of interesting insights. For example, she says that it’s difficult to tell how much pain or distress is being suffered by prey animals (cows, sheep, goats); they try to disguise it, since a sickly animal is likely to be a target for a passing wolf. Predator animals, on the other hand, have no such tendency and will, if anything, exaggerate their pain. As you’ll know if you’ve ever stepped on a cat’s paw.

It’s good. One of those books where you keep reading bits out to people. And if you haven’t read any Oliver Sacks you should read those too.

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Nature Other

Bomb-sniffing flowers

Scientists in Denmark, the US and Canada have all been working on producing a genetically-engineered plant whose flowers will come up red instead of white in the presence of underground explosives. The idea, of course, is that you can use them to to test for the presence of landmines by dropping the seeds from the air and seeing what colour the flowers are when they come up.

Apart from the benefits if the technology works (and the rampant symbolism), this is the kind of project that the genetic engineers needed to come up with at the start of the technology to help sell it to the public. It would take a very hard person, however suspicious they were of science, to oppose a cheap new mine-detection technology.

Instead, of course, despite all the publicity about how GM products were going to end third-world hunger, reinvigorate medicine and who knows what else, the first major products were herbicide-resistent crops, allowing farmers to use even more toxic chemicals in the quest for ever-more intensive crop production. Personally I think that most of the opposition to GM food is incoherent, illogical and based entirely on prejudice, but I still can’t feel very positive about Round-up Ready soybeans.

via Metafilter; photo from and presumably © missouriplants.com

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Culture Nature

Intellectuals, science, and the English Channel

Something Todd Swift said pointed me to an article in the Guardian about the lack of public intellectuals in Britain, written by Agnès Poirier, a French journalist working in London. It’s worth reading just for the culture-clash exhibited in the comments.

I noticed that the unspoken assumption, from both sides of the argument, was inevitably that an intellectual is a philosopher, a cultural theorist, a littérateur and not, for example, someone like Richard Dawkins.* So I started digging around for this quote from C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures:

I remember G. H. Hardy once remarking to me in mild puzzlement, some time in the 1930s, “Have you noticed how the word “intellectual” is used nowadays? There seems to be a new definition which certainly doesn’t include Rutherford or Eddington or Dirac or Adrian or me? It does seem rather odd, don’t y’know.”

The point being, of course, that Hardy was a mathematician, Rutherford (no relation), Eddington and Dirac were physicists and Adrian was, Wikipedia informs me, a physiologist. Three of them won Nobel prizes. I remember being very struck by that quote when I first read it, and I still think Snow’s basic point about the wilful scientific ignorance of those in the humanities is a good one, even if some of the other things he says in the essay don’t stand up very well. Indeed Wikipedia led me to an essay by Roger Kimball titled “The two cultures” today, published in 1994 in the New Criterion. Kimball does an excellent and largely deserved demolition job on Snow’s essay, but in the process demonstrates exactly the depressing indifference to science that Snow was complaining about.

Snow’s argument operates by erasing or ignoring certain fundamental distinctions. He goes to a literary party, discovers that no one (except himself) can explain the second law of thermodynamics, and then concludes triumphantly: “yet I was asking something which is about the equivalent of Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?” But, as Leavis notes, “there is no scientific equivalent of that question; equations between orders so disparate are meaningless.” The second law of thermodynamics is a piece of specialized knowledge, useful or irrelevant depending on the job to be done; the works of Shakespeare provide a window into the soul of humanity: to read them is tantamount to acquiring self-knowledge. Snow seems blind to this distinction.

“A piece of specialized knowledge, useful or irrelevant depending on the job to be done”. It just makes me want to cry. An insight into the fundamental workings of the universe reduced to a tool, a mathematical spanner, something of no possible interest to anyone who doesn’t need it to do a job. An indirect and second-hand insight into ‘the soul of humanity’ meanwhile is of such obvious value that it apparently goes without saying.

Such arrogance. Not just the intellectual arrogance that is willing to dismiss physics as just a tool for getting jobs done, but the arrogance to assume that ‘self-knowledge’ is of more value than the attempt to understand everything that exists. This isn’t an argument, it’s just an assertion of self-importance.

And yes, I do know that scientists are sometimes just as arrogantly dismissive of the value of the humanities. For the sake of even-handedness, and because it amuses me, here’s a quote from Dirac: “In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.”

* Just a note to say that when I wrote this, Dawkins hadn’t yet published The God Delusion; he did write articles about atheism but was primarily known as a writer about evolutionary theory.

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Culture Nature Other

The ternness of terns

George Szirtes discusses people’s need to identify things – flowers, birds – something he doesn’t share. Indeed he sets up (but slightly backs away from), an opposition between the botanist’s way of looking and the artists’s way. He ends like this:

Yet all the time I am aware that even an urban citoyen of the imagination should be able to tell a kingfisher by its silhouette as it flashes across a narrow stream or be able to name at least a hundred stars. One should be able to do that really, as well as trying to render the flashing sensation in language and learning to define the starness of stars.

I can’t help feeling that those people – the vast majority – who can’t distinguish a gull from a tern, a swallow from a swift, or a bee from a wasp or a hoverfly, are completely failing to appreciate the ternness of terns.

Being able to recognise something and distinguish it from superficially similar things seems absolutely central to any attempt to learn something about its thingness. The ability to attach a name is secondary to the process of coming to know a thing the way you know a familiar place or a friend.

Conversely, any birdwatcher could tell you that gaining some sense of a bird’s thingness, its inscape, is a key part of learning to identify it. Of course, being a prosaic bunch, they don’t call it ‘inscape’, they call it ‘jizz’. But if there’s a distinction between saying ‘I knew it was a tern because of its tern-like jizz’ and ‘I knew it was a tern because it had ternness’, it would take a better philosopher than me to elucidate it.

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Nature

Transitional species

I was looking back at old PFFA threads yesterday, and there was an argument about religion, evolution and so on during which someone asserted that “there are no verifiable fossil records of transitions from one species to another.” This morning I feel inclined to make a point which I don’t think is always appreciated by people who have never had to deal with issues of taxonomy; which is that, quite apart from the fossil record, transitional species are all around us.

I should probably start by establishing what a species is. A canonical species is a population of animals that can interbreed freely with each other and only with each other. In evolutionary terms, one species becomes two at the moment when the populations diverge so much that the split becomes irreversible. Because evolution works by a process of gradual changes, there will always be an ambiguous period when it is unclear whether that split has occured.

The obvious mechanism for a split happening is that two geographically separate populations develop in different directions. On the local level, the vast majority of species are easily separable from each other, but on the broader view, ambiguities about species status are almost the norm.

Let’s talk about wrens. To Europeans, ‘the’ wren is a familiar bird; tiny, loud-voiced, with a place in folklore and poetry. Most don’t realise that wrens are actually a New World family. All over the Americas there are dozens of species of wren, including some really quite large species:

Cactus Wren, originally uploaded by Bournemouth Pilot.

But at some point, one species, Troglodytes troglodytes, made it across the Atlantic or the Baring Straits and spread all across Eurasia. The particular species is still found in North America, where it’s known as the Winter Wren. It probably came across fairly recently, in biological terms, because it’s still similar enough across its range to be classified as a single species, and there are very very few species of small, non-migratory birds which are native to both North America and Eurasia. Nonetheless, there’s enough local variation – in colour, size, proportion – that it is classified into no fewer than 46 sub-species. These are two of them; the first was taken in mainland Scotland so is presumably Troglodytes troglodytes indigenus:

This is T. t. zetlandicus taken in the Shetland Islands (i.e. about 100 miles north of Scotland):

zetlandicus is slightly larger, slightly darker and greyer, and has a slightly longer tail. The differences are small, but consistent. In the opinion of the taxonomists, none of the 46 subspecies of Winter Wren are so distinct as to represent a permanent split. I suppose the implication is that, if a few Shetland wrens were taken to the mainland, they would be absorbed into the local population. But given a few thousand years more, perhaps they will be so distinct that they will need full species status. Or perhaps that population will die out, from disease or freak weather. Or perhaps wrens from the mainland make it across the water just about often enough to keep the gene pool from diverging completely.

This is what a transitional species looks like. Boring, isn’t it? Not a monkey-man or a walking fish, just a rather drab bird which is a bit larger and a bit drabber than its closest relatives. That’s what evolution at the dirty end is like – grindingly slow and mundane.

One more example. The first is a Great Blue Heron, Ardea herodias, from North America, the second is a Grey Heron, Ardea cinerea, found across Eurasia.

Looking at them, there’s no doubt at all that they are descended from the same species. Some time a few thousand years ago, or a few tens of thousands of years ago, enough herons crossed the ocean in one or other direction to establish a breeding population. It was recent enough that the two species look extremely similar, but they are distinguishable; the Great Blue has a darker neck and red on the thighs and underwing coverts, and in breeding plumage has more plumes on the neck.

The world is full of pairs of species that are so similar that they obviously split from the same species fairly recently, and subspecies that are recognisably different from each other. Taxonomists change their mind about classification all the time as research continues, splitting species up or lumping them together. For example, when I first saw Hoopoe in Africa about 15 years ago, my bird book said it was the same species as the Hoopoes in Europe. But according to Avibase, different taxonomists split Hoopoe into different combinations of four different species: Eurasian Hoopoe, Central African Hoopoe, African Hoopoe and Madagascar Hoopoe. For example, the fourth edition of Clements recognised two species, African and European; the fifth edition demoted African Hoopoe to a subspecies but promoted Madagascan Hoopoe to a full species.

Taxonomy is an important and useful exercise in establishing the relationships between animals, but the neatness of the categories can be misleading. The whole scheme of putting animals into a sequence of different boxes makes it look like you’re establishing fundamental patterns in the organisation of life:

Shetland Island Wren

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Aves
Order: Passeriformes
Family: Troglodytidae
Genus: Troglodytes
Species: T. troglodytes
Subspecies: T. t. zetlandicus

But most of the categories have no special status. The species is the closest thing to a well-defined unit that has some kind of observable reality, and even species, as I hope I’ve indicated, are a lot less clear-cut than you might imagine. All the others are just approximate indications of relatedness. Two species in the same genus are very similar and therefore closely related; if they’re only in the same family, they’re a bit less closely related, and so on.

That’s not to say that the individual categories – the order Passeriformes, for example – are imprecise or misleading; but the term ‘order’ has no definable meaning, beyond “a rank between class and family”. If taxonomists feel the need to make finer distinctions, they just add in new ranks, like a superorder or a suborder. Don’t let the neatness of the taxonomical hierarchy fool you into thinking that the tree of life is correspondingly neat.

[All photographs © their respective photographers]

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Nature Other

Learning algebra

Something Kevin said sent me towards an article in the Washington Post about the uselessness of algebra to normal life, and the ensuing mouth-frothing response in the comments over at Pharyngula.

Two things I’d say. It rather makes me despair to see people talk about algebra as though it was advanced mathematics. Algebra is hardly even a branch of mathematics; it’s just a notational tool to allow you to move beyond arithmetic. It’s not quite true to say that it’s impossible to do any maths more advanced than arithmetic without algebra; the ancient Greeks managed without, for example. But it’s certainly completely central to the way maths is done today. Unless you think that high school should be satisfied with achieving no more than basic literacy and numeracy, passing a one-year course in basic algebra is not an outrageously high standard to hold for high-school graduation. Depending what you think a high-school diploma should stand for, it might even be an outrageously low standard. Judging by the article, this girl who couldn’t graduate because she didn’t pass algebra actually didn’t have basic numeracy skills, which means both that she shouldn’t be qualifying high school and that the school system has competely failed her.

The other point I’d make about the ‘I’ve never needed to use maths since I left school’ argument is that we all forget a large proprtion of what we learned in school unless we use it frequently. I did maths to quite an advanced level at school; I did two maths A-levels, which, for non-UK readers, meant I got as far as complex numbers, basic calculus, polar functions, basic mechanics, some statistics including things like Poisson distributions.

I can’t actually do any of that maths anymore. But having done it does mean that I’m not intimidated by equations; that I know what a standard deviation is, and a tangent and a function, and what binary numbers are, and what calculus is useful for so on. It’s not enough to enable me to do anything much, but understanding the concepts makes it easier to read popular science books, for example, or to make some kind of judgement about how useful a statistic is.

I also think that as a result, I’m much more comfortable than I would otherwise have been doing the kind of maths that *does* come up in everyday life. It’s good that schools teach a bit more than the students will really need, because hopefully that means the important suff will have a chance to really get properly absorbed.